Recent Titles

This book offers a historical analysis of sortition. It brings together a number of the best specialists on political sortition from antiquity to contemporary experiments, in Europe but also in the Ancient Middle East and in imperial China. It demonstrates that sortition has been a crucial device in political history.

After years of lucid dreaming, the author spontaneously experiences a series of religious encounters with intense light which bring an awareness of the presence of God. He describes a number of these encounters in detail. The greater part of the book then presents an analysis of these experiences.

This book is a collection of eight essays on the work of the twentieth-century English philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott. Six of them advance the view in different ways that Oakeshott's multifarious lifework may be understood as variations on a singular insight — that the structure of experiential reality is 'creative' or 'poetic'.

This volume in the St Andrews series contains a collection of essays from leading authors regarding the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, in particular issues in mind and metaphysics, and can be considered a partner work to 2016's The Moral Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (also published by Imprint Academic).

In the 21st century, climate change is projected to increase the already significant immigration pressures that rich countries in Europe and North America face. However, the willingness of citizens in destination countries to let further foreigners immigrate is unlikely to keep pace with that increase. These issues are discussed in this book.

This book argues that new developments in the sciences, in particular twentieth-century physics and twenty-first-century biology, suggest revising several pessimistic outlooks for the development of a scientific understanding of the relationship of humans with the universe.

Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Jaynes, points out the blind spots of mainstream, establishment psychology by providing empirical support for Jaynes's ideas on sociohistorical shifts in cognition. He argues that from around 3500 to 1000 BCE the archaeological and historical record reveals features of hallucinatory super-religiosity.

Shining New Light Through the Cracks of the Bicameral MindLawrence Wile

Following on from Jaynes, this book suggests that the evolution of the relationship between consciousnesses, mass, energy, and spacetime radically changed nearly 6,000 years ago during the epigenetic, evolutionary degeneration of a little-known, threadlike structure originating from the center of the central nervous system called Reissner's fiber.

Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. This book is a reprint of a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted to this topic. It takes the form of a target paper by the editor, followed by commentaries from various thinkers representing various academic disciplines.

An Edwardian Elite and the Riddle of the Cross-Correspondence Automatic WritingsTrevor Hamilton

This book tells the incredible story of the cross-correspondence automatic writings, described by one leading scholar of the field, Alan Gauld, 'as undoubtedly the most extensive, the most complex and the most puzzling of all ostensible attempts by deceased persons to manifest purpose...'

The sixth volume in the series Michael Oakeshott: Selected Writings. From the 1920s to the 1980s Oakeshott filled dozens of notebooks with his private reflections, both personal and intellectual. Their contents range from aphorisms to miniature essays, forming a unique record of his intellectual trajectory over his entire career.

Freedom's Progress is a history of Western political thought, a conceptual map as it were, tracking the fitful journey of one particular concept — liberty — through time. The book covers the full philosophical canon — from Plato to Rawls — but is written from the perspective of the libertarian tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.

This volume — a companion to Thomas Reid: Selected Philosophical Writings (2012) — makes available material from Thomas Reid's autograph manuscripts and student notes of his lectures. It includes an introductory essay by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

The Many Faces of Coincidence proposes an inclusive categorisation for coincidences of all shapes and sizes. At the same time, some of the implications arising from the various explanations are explored, including the possibility of an underlying unity of mind and matter constituting the ground of being.

Essays by contributors from Britain, Canada, Hong Kong, India, and the USA provide a comprehensive critical assessment of the principal aspects of Oakeshott's thought that account for his contemporary relevance.

This collection brings together the text of the monograph Art and Morality by the philosopher Richard Beardsmore along with fourteen other essays (both published and previously unpublished) in which he explores further some of the themes of his seminal book.

This book discusses a process (microgenetic) theory of the mental state of creativity that differs markedly from mainstream (cognitive) psychology, but with the potential to clarify many features of thought and imagery, normal and exceptional. Creativity is not an isolated problem but touches many central issues in philosophical psychology.

The pieces collected in this volume are not presented as amounting to an overall account or theory of our cultural condition. They are offered merely as examples of serious criticism, of what we need if we are to begin to think more profitably about our condition.

In this collection of new essays deriving from a conference held in Oxford aspects of Elizabeth Anscombe's moral philosophy are examined. Anyone interested in Anscombe's work all want to read this volume.

Spinoza: Basic Concepts explores key concepts involved in Spinoza's thinking, relating it to his understanding of philosophy, outlining the arguments and explaining the implications of each concept. Together, the chapters cover the full range of Spinoza’s interdisciplinary system of philosophy.

This fourth and final volume of writings by Elizabeth Anscombe reprints her Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, together with a number of later essays on thought and language in which she explores issues of reason, representation, truth and existence.

How expert opinions keep changing on life, the universe, and everythingMartin Cohen

This book offers vital clues for understanding not only the way knowledge develops, but also into the dangers of accepting too readily or too uncritically the claims of experts of all kinds — even philosophical ones! The claims are invariably presented as objective fact, yet are rooted in human subjectivity.

The book examines why social radicals supported liberal education, why they have moved away from it, and what the implications are for the future of an intellectually stimulating and culturally literate education.

Based on nearly twenty years of scientific and literary research, this book enters the atypical minds of poetic geniuses — Blake, Keats, Hugo, Rilke, Yeats, Merrill, Plath and Hughes — by way of the visible signs in their lives, beliefs, and shared practices.

This book comprises eleven essays on Gentile's thought. Seven of these are new pieces written especially for Thought Thinking, supplemented by new English translations of four of Gentile's shorter works, selected to offer some direct insight into his ideas and style of writing.

Church-going, Going, Gone! is concerned less with teaching than with learning. It provides atheists, agnostics and believers-in-exile, as well as those who have given little thought to belief, with a framework for collaborating as learners, working toward equality, peace and reconciliation, and dedicated to unselfish and imaginative social action.

Known today mainly as a teacher of Adam Smith (1723–90) and an influence on David Hume (1711–76), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was a first-rate thinker whose work deserves study on its own merit. Spanning his entire literary career, this collection brings together selections from Hutcheson's greater and lesser known works.

This volume addresses the question of what it is like to be depressed. Despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted into the causes and treatment of depression, the experience of depression remains poorly understood.

In an age of ubiquitous digital media and permanent mutual observation scandals are omnipresent. This books describes recent case-(hi)stories, discussing public figures such as Tiger Woods and Anthony Weiner, the powerful and the helpless that suddenly find themselves in a worldwide pillory.

Related to the key areas of Pauli's and Jung's joint interests, the book covers overlapping issues from the perspectives of physics, philosophy, and psychology. Of primary significance are epistemological questions connected to issues such as realism, measurement, observation, consciousness, and the unconscious.

Between 1965 and 2002 several key lines of research emerged which, taken together, can potentially revolutionise our understanding of the place of consciousness in the universe. In this book the author explains the close connections between these new ingredients.

This book presents the conclusions of a psychologist seeking to make sense of contemporary particle physics as described in a number of popular science texts and media articles, written by physicists, seeking to explain the workings of the sub-atomic world.

Amputated Souls explores the subject of the assault upon human rights and human freedom by psychiatrists and the clinical methods they use. The book traces the history of lobotomy and ECT from their invention in southern Europe in the 1930s, under fascist and authoritarian regimes, to the present day.

This book presents a critical reconstruction of the social and political facets of Thomas Hill Green's liberal socialism. It builds on Colin Tyler's The Metaphysics of Self-realisation and Freedom (2010), although it can also be read as a freestanding work.

This book divides into two parts. The first is a personal narrative of the impact of the death of the author's son Ralph on him and his family. The second is an attempt to evaluate that evidence objectively (based on an extensive survey of current and past scientific research in the UK and the USA).

The Scottish Enlightenment provided the fledgling United States of America and its emerging universities with a philosophical orientation. This volume in the Library of Scottish Philosophy demonstrates the remarkable extent of this philosophical influence.

In this volume, the author sets aside the usual division between theories of punishment that do or do not focus on retribution. In its place he proposes and explores the distinction between internalist and externalist theories.

Featured Titles

The Jaynes LegacyShining New Light Through the Cracks of the Bicameral MindLawrence Wile